Mozilla opened to the public the first beta version of its 'Fennec' browser for mobiles, which is currently compatible with the Nokia N810 Internet Tablets only.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of improvements, especially around performance. Mozilla has done heavy optimizations to the frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth.

They have also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. TraceMonkey is also enabled bringing to mobile the JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas.

On the feature front, Mozilla has enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and improved bookmark management.

Mozilla said that one of their main focuses for the next milestone would be on polishing the user interface areas.

More information about this BETA release is available here. If you're viewing this on an N810, install Fennec.